Tablet Catalogs Rethink Casual Page-Flipping

Catalogs.com’s new iPad app offers something unique. Just like the website, it aggregates inventory for a wide range of retail stores and pairs them with coupons and a central wish list. But it lays them out in a familiar catalog form that you can browse by flipping virtual pages on the iPad’s touchscreen.

It’s not lifestyle porn. There aren’t any two-page spreads showing clothing or furniture in impossibly well-appointed houses. It’s just a familiar, straightforward way to find good deals on products you want, whether from brick-and-mortar giants like Home Depot and Foot Locker or web/catalog standbys like Musician’s Friend, Ghirardelli Chocolate and Little Tykes.

And it’s something you can hold in your hand, sitting in a waiting room or laying on a couch — perfect for the kind of casual reading web-browsing that’s suited to the iPad. Released this week, Catalogs.com is currently the 5th most downloaded app in iTunes’s Lifestyle section, behind eBay and ahead of Amazon.

“We’re not PDF-dependent,” Catalogs.com president Richard Linevsky told Wired.com, contrasting his company’s HTML5 approach with that of other retailers offering catalog apps. “We’re feed-dependent. If you have a feed, we can literally build a catalog for anybody. So it allows people that are in the website world to have a flippable catalog that they never had before.”

Even for retailers who already have their own catalogs, Linevsky thinks their HTML5 approach gives retailers additional flexibility. “We can update in 24 hours,” he said. “PDF-based apps can’t do that… There are definitely some benefits to PDFs; with glossy images, they’re very nice to look at. But they don’t interact as smoothly, and many of them don’t interact at all.

“If a merchant wants to do that, they should. Our [catalog] doesn’t really have to compete with that,” Linevsky added. “They can still be on our program. And we have the added benefit of being able to attract customers beyond their existing base.

“What we’ve built isn’t designed for an 8.5 by 11-inch page, which then has to be shunk down,” sacrificing readability, Linevsky said. “It’s optimized for the tablet. And it’s easy for us to adjust to even smaller screens.”

Because the application was built in HTML5, Catalogs.com was able to simultaneously launch an iPad-optimized webapp version of the store. The idea is that retailers will be able to link or redirect to a custom URL for their catalog at catalogs.com, saving some of them the trouble of having to build a separate interface for iPad. Linevsky felt the feed-to-graphic-catalog approach was powerful enough that Catalogs.com filed a patent on the IP.

There are 30 retail partners in the initial launch — much fewer than the number on the Catalogs.com site — but Linevsky plans to expand that. He’s also hoping to add more social and sharing features, offering merchants greater input on how their products appear in the app and developing it for Android and other mobile platforms within the next 60 days.

Linevsky describes the iPad app as a coffee table full of catalogs held in one hand. It definitely shows that the digital reading revolution isn’t limited to books, magazines, or newspapers. In time, nearly every printed form factor can be recreated as an application, a web site or both.

What may be surprising about the current wave of innovation, as opposed to the early iterations of the web, is that while the backend workflows are changing rapidly, the end-user’s physical modes of interaction with reading are becoming closer to how we’ve traditionally done things — more familiar, not less.